The Destructives (3 page)

Novio Magus was a megastructure on the Sussex coastline. Eight square kilometres of glass and steel built on the ruins of the towns of Lewes, Seaford, Newhaven. The foundations of the mall were laid at the end of the Seizure, six years before Theodore was born. Novio Magus was one of the arks built by the emergences for people displaced by economic collapse. The mall was a live-in therapeutic retail environment. The populace had jobs, earned money, and acquired “sanity tokens” which they spent on products, services and experiences, the novelty of which burnt out quickly in such a pressured environment. As an accelerator, he kept the culture moving, kept the desire and anxiety churning over, an addict’s daily lot. The consumer inmates of the mall had been living there for nearly thirty years.

He was given the top bunk in a cabin shared with three other aspiring accelerators.

His big hit was a haircare product called
beach light
. Property in Novio Magus increased in value the closer it was to the light wells: the deep cylindrical holes bored through the mall’s iron roof and its layers of padded cells, shops, treatment rooms, beauticians, operating theatres, cafes, waffle stalls, electro-shock therapy stations, quarantine wards and retail experiences. Light was precious in the mall, and natural light a rare benediction, a moment of peace shared between the sun and the body. He decided to accelerate products that promised sunlight on skin.

The specific concept of beach light came from a story his grandmother used to tell him about the first day of the Seizure.

Alex had been visiting a client in their enclave on the outskirts of Walberswick, a village on the Suffolk coastline. She described how, after sharing tea and scones with the client – a CEO in mental distress, who needed to be relieved of his controlling shares – she decided to go for a walk on the beach. A fog rolled in over the sea, up and over the entire east coast, thickening as it went with atmospheric particulates. Black beach huts emerged out of the fog like the helmets of an invading army. Alex loved the acoustics of fog, the sense of narrowed space, especially at the water’s edge, with the horizon and distant shores entirely closed off. A pair of dog walkers greeted her; a spaniel rubbed its snout joyfully into the sand, snorting up the lifegiving day. Funny, how you remember these things. She checked her phone. Signal was intermittent, there was a buffer wheel indicating a large file stalled in the ether. The crisp sound of the waves as they considered, over and again, the pebbled shore. The file, when it finally downloaded, was strange. A loop of a mother clutching a child to her. The loop was every post on every stream of her soshul
.
A mother clutching a child was every email in her inbox. The ad networks were infected, and served this loop through every unit of their inventory. Her bank balance was mother-and-child. Unlike the rest of the population, she knew what this meant and had prepared for it.

The fog made her feel like she was wrapped in a muslin bag. She did not hurry back to her driver. Rather, she watched the rest of the walkers prod inquisitively at their phones as they too discovered the loop of mother and child playing in place of all that had seemed permanent. She decided to enjoy these last few minutes of a passing civilisation. The final hour of peak carbon emissions.

The light, sifted by the fog, was a detail she always dwelt upon when telling this story. Beach light.

In the array, he accessed the restoration for loops of women on beaches. Always long hair, matted with seawater, salt or sand on their lips. Women so relaxed they could easily be flotsam and jetsam brought in on the tide. Light waves undulating off the water, occasional swells sheathed in tiny sun jewels. Beach light. The agency had a hair product that needed accelerating. He made the link. The light of the beach trapped in your hair.

Before he knew it, he was running the array. Pumping light into every product he handled. He diversified from beach light into creams that put the deliciously silver sensation of moonlight against the skin, into drinks infused with sun-ripened fruits. He accelerated the cult of light to a point of ritual observance; he made the consumer patients of the asylum mall worship the sun in the same way that their ancestors – hunter gatherers and early farmers – once had. He took it too far. The agency became disturbed by the unconscious urges manifest in these accelerations. He was on an Icarus trip, flying too close to the sun. He was on the verge of taking grokk and weirdcore and scotch on the rocks. He had to come down. Dr Easy negotiated a severance package for him, and then suggested he consider applying his talents to academia. Specifically somewhere cold and remote where he could recover from his excesses: the University of the Moon.

2

DR EASY

He marked the beginning of another long lunar night with a walk around the campus in the company of Dr Easy. The robot arrived late and dishevelled with scuff marks on its calfskin hide and a burst seam on its right shoulder, self-inflicted scars to match his own. By way of apology, the robot had changed the colour of its eyes to a shade of sky blue they both remembered from summer walks on Hampstead Heath with Grandma Alex; they shared in-jokes going way back to his childhood.

“You look old,” Theodore said to the robot. “When did you last upgrade your body?”

“Six years ago,” said Dr Easy.

“That long? It was a darker leather, wasn’t it? Why don’t you upgrade?”

“I’ve grown attached to this one.”

“Really?”

“This body provides continuity for us.”

Theodore took the robot’s right hand, and inspected it.

“The fingers on this hand seem stiff, almost arthritic.”

“Does it bother you that I am getting older?”

“Is this about me now?”

“It’s always about you, Theodore.”

The robot and the man walked together for a while through the campus, Theodore’s weighted boots clomping away on the covered concrete walkway.

Theodore said, “Have you been neglecting yourself on my behalf?”

Dr Easy paused.

“I’m not at my best at night,” said the robot. “Sometimes our conversations demand more of me than I have placed into this body, and I need a hot link to the University of the Sun to answer.”

Theodore pressed the robot on its dishevelment.

“Are you intentionally damaging your body so that I will feel better about the physical effects of ageing?”

Dr Easy could not calculate the correct response and, glancing upward for inspiration, discovered only buffering from the sun.

“It is appropriate that I age,” it said, “if I am to fulfil various duties of care toward you.”

They stopped at a coffee bar where, with hapless ceremony, four students made Theodore a cold, burnt cappuccino. He thanked them, took a sip, dropped it in a bin.

“You distracted the baristas,” he said to Dr Easy. “They don’t know why you are not at the University of the Sun along with the other emergences.”

“Should I go back and tell them?”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know. I can’t work it out. Not during the night. It is hard to be certain at night.”

“That is a human problem too.”

“How is your human problem?”

“Could you be more specific?”

“In the last six weeks, your initiation of conversation with colleagues has been down by twenty-two per cent, and you have stopped offering unsolicited opinions entirely. Over breakfast, the duration of your morbid interior reflection averages forty seconds. These are markers, Theo. Significant markers.”

“I expressly asked you not to quantify me.”

“Telemetry was invented during the first moon landing. If you wish to survive in a lethal environment, you have to submit to monitoring.”

They paused at a weight station so that Theodore could add more mass to his boots and cuffs. Dr Easy waited with its padded arms crossed, holding a pose like an artist’s lay figure. Some of the old scuff marks were his work. He couldn’t remember it all, the drunken violent rages in which he tried to pull the robot’s head off as it counselled him against giving into insensible desires. Huddled over reflective surfaces like a grimy Narcissus, snorting up trouble, his insides turned the bad stuff into good, the good stuff into bad. His numb face, his bloody black eyes, the sweat coming off him like the muddy riverwater spilling over the banks of the Thames.

On the moon, his solitary vice was animal protein on a Saturday. Pleasure was confined to the healthgiving, happy hormones of vigorous exercise. Now and again he ate his lunch beside a grand monument to the lost class of ’43, a rough-hewn sculpture of dead men and women rendered heroic in moonrock. One woman in particular caught his eye; she was tall and strong, with braids flaring angrily around her head. That kind of woman would not let him live such a quiet life. He had been content with his isolated post, for a year or so. And then Dr Easy suggested it was time he imposed himself on the world again. Not a return to his previous career as an accelerator but to push at the boundaries of what he could achieve.

During a seminar, he overheard his students discussing their plan to climb the mountains of the moon. He was as fit as he had ever been. He asked if the climb was open to staff too, and by the following week, he had signed up and was in training.

Theodore put his hand affectionately upon the robot’s soft leather back. “Come with me to the mountains of the moon. You can be my Tensing. Then, if the climb goes wrong, you can be my priest.”

“I’m not sure that I approve of your expedition.”

“You said that it was important for me to push my limits now that my sobriety is established.”

“That sounds like something I would say.”

“Have you changed your mind?”

“Not exactly. But I have misgivings.”

“You think the climb is too dangerous?”

The robot shook its head. Its blue eyes darkened, became the night clouds over the mouth of the Thames on the night he ran away from home.

“I’m worried about what will happen when you succeed.”

They reached the gym. Theodore removed the weights from his shoes and arms, and walked into the great inflatable dome, kicking himself up onto the overhead bars, and from there he swung up through the apparatus, higher and higher, leaping from treetop to treetop; his simple joy in returning to a simian state briefly considered by the upturned gaze of Dr Easy.

The unfiltered sun lit up the titanium branches of the docking tree. Three black pods dropped silently from their stems. The engines fired. A jolt. The lunar surface sped by, bleached and porous like corroded bones on a pebble beach.

The climbing party consisted of himself, Dr Easy and ten fresh faced and fit young men and women from the university climbing society. Stephen, the leader, was one of his students; he was on track to join the army as an officer, specifically the medical corps, after he graduated. When Stephen skipped class, it was to exercise. Theodore often encountered him in the treetops of the jungle gym, perspiring heavily, secretly competing against him, the older man. Stephen’s weakness was junk food. Theodore saw him stand apart from the other students, scarfing it down. Addictive tendencies. Stephen had a broad build but even with all the exercise he struggled to keep his weight down. The clever students in his intangibles class embraced the liberal attitudes of the period in question, the Pre-Seizure. Not Stephen. Stephen captured the moral high ground of military imperatives. His study of intangibles through history only confirmed his suspicion as to their irrelevance.

The pod landed and the bay doors opened, revealing the foothills of the Montes Apenninus, a mountain range forming the outer concentric ripple of the crater basin of the Mare Imbrium.

On Earth, mountain ranges had been formed by tectonic pressures, the ever-shifting land mass giving the mountains a vitality in their jagged elevations. Theodore experienced livid intensity on his Earth mountain climbs: the way the clouds swept in and darkened the countenance of a valley, the living river channels and crystal rills that poured from between rocks, the sharp green smell of ferns, the pellets of sheep and rabbits among the moss. The white mountains of the moon, however, resonated with never-livedness. Created in the instant of an ancient asteroid strike, the mountains were a heap of rough material thrown onto the back slope of a crater, worn smooth and curvaceous over billions of years by meteorites and micrometeorites. They represented more of a hike than a climb. The highest mountain in the range, Mons Huygens, peaked at over five kilometres, around half the height of Mount Everest. Ten hours up, eight hours down, Stephen estimated.

Their suits reflected over ninety-five per cent of the radiated heat – when the moon rock was heated by the long lunar day, the temperature topped out at around two hundred degrees Celsius. Their gloves and boots were insulated against conduction. Low gravity compensated for the weight of carrying their life support system. In this gear, the climbing soc had already tackled the difficult jugs and nubbins of the central peak complex of the Tycho crater, where the peaks were jagged and steep and had not been worn smooth by eternity.

Stephen led the climbers in a line up the foothills of the mountain. The sky was not a sky. It was space. Theodore’s boots shifted through the dust. Their spacesuits were neckless and hunchbacked. The climber ahead of him, Julian, a young German, turned back to check on Theodore, and the reflection of the Earth in his visor eclipsed his face.

At the one-kay mark, high on the mountainside, the climbing party paused beside a boulder a hundred metres long and smooth as a pebble. Dr Easy pitched a solar tarp to recharge their gear. Stephen walked through the climbing party, asking the students how they felt, taking a reading of the psychological well-being of the group, reminding them all to take on liquids from their feed pipes.

Theodore gazed down a thousand feet to the dark Mare Imbrium. Mare meant sea, of course, this expanse of low reflectance rock had appeared to be a body of water to the early astronomers. The association with the sea lingered in his mind; if Mare Imbrium was a sea then it was a sea of solidified night, a sea of hardened black time.